In the UK there is a national shortage of teachers in STEM disciplines, with recruitment challenges compounded by high attrition rates among early-career teachers. To address this, we are developing a persuasive video game to inform STEM undergraduates about teaching careers while helping them assess their fit for the profession. This paper presents the first stage of our design process: co-designing with potential end-users through paper prototypes and focus groups. We conducted focus group interviews and individual semi-structured interviews with STEM undergraduates (n=9, aged 18-23) involving career discussions and interactive play sessions with a paper prototype of our narrative game, TeachQuest. Using thematic analysis, we identified two themes related to teaching career perceptions (Extrinsic barriers shaped by prior experience & Confidence in skills and qualities influence intrinsic motivation) and two themes related to game design preferences (Content and Reflection). Our findings reveal novel insights about the skills and qualities undergraduates believe are required for teaching, and demonstrate how paper prototypes can elicit detailed feedback on persuasive game design. We contribute design guidelines for persuasive career recruitment games that emphasise embedded reflection mechanisms, authentic decision-making, and balanced representation of career realities. These guidelines extend beyond teacher recruitment to inform the design of career exploration games more broadly.

Attachment is a crucial part of children's psychological development and can impact social relationships and overall mental health and well-being.However, measures to assess attachment are traditionally costly in terms of time and use.Though previous interventions have tried to support the assessment of attachment in children, there have been few developments of a low-cost, fast, and efficient tool.Therefore, we present the demo for a School Attachment Monitor (SAM).The SAM is a digital tool that utilises artificial intelligence to assess attachment in children with 80% accuracy [21].Our demo showcases the SAM at a key point of development, exploring alternative methods of interaction to suit young children today and its deployability in schools.

Persuasive games, designed to change attitudes and inspire behavior change, have attracted significant interest. In particular, persuasive recruitment games are increasingly in demand due to under recruitment in many occupations. However, research on persuasive games often lacks clear design guidance and tends to focus on individual player experience factors, rather than identifying and prioritizing the most influential ones that should shape design decisions. Our study (n = 957) examined how player experience impacts recruitment interventions aimed at encouraging careers in teaching. We compared three approaches; a persuasive game, a “realistic job preview” (RJP) and a control game. Effectiveness was measured by increases in Interest (in teaching), Person-vocation (PV) fit and Self-efficacy. Results showed that the persuasive game was the most effective at increasing Interest, while the RJP had the greatest impact on PV fit and Self-efficacy. Interest was primarily influenced by experiences of meaning, followed by mastery. Conversely, mastery followed by meaning were the strongest influences on PV fit and Self-efficacy. Experiences of immersion or autonomy had no significant effect on persuasion. We discuss how understanding which aspects of game experience have most impact can aid the design of persuasive games for recruitment and other purposes. 

Game design for mental health games is challenging balancing the mental health goals and the engagement of users. A potential approach to designing mental health games is through user involvement methods such as participatory design, co-design and user-centred design. User involvement methods give users a ‘voice’ in the design of products and services, involving them in the design, implementation and evaluation of a product. However, there is actually very little guidance how to successfully involve young people within the design and development of applied games. In presenting my research and future plans of my PhD, I discuss how we can engage young people through user involvement methods for the design of mental health games.